Furio could feel something was off with this volley. There had been a delay between it and the others.

A small delay, one no more significant than a second, but in the realm of four-star adventurers and monsters of the same caliber, such a shift would not go unnoticed.

A stronger attack? A more varied one, perhaps?

Regardless, Furio prepared by extending his {Sense Aura} out even farther, the mana flowing from his body in a circular field around him stretching to twenty meters in radius.

As someone with a Flow origin, Furio was naturally gifted with the movement of mana within and outside his body at both the micro and macro scales.

Among four-star adventurers, his sense aura was among the largest and most sensitive, picking up even the drop of a single snowflake in a raging blizzard.

Furio registered movement at the edges of the field.

Both edges.

Countless small stone shards closing in from both the left and the right. He widened his eyes, but the surprise did not weigh him down.

In adventuring, the unexpected was always near. The difference between a dead and live adventurer lay in adapting to it.

Furio aimed his wrench towards one side of the volley and pushed out the electric dagger Fulmi from his wrench.

Then, he drove mana into his legs to use the common martial art {Dash}.

Green wrapped around his legs as he sprinted to the other volley, bolt-like arcs of magic screeching as steaming heat arose from the friction of his boots slamming into the dirt.

Meanwhile with a mental command, Furio activated Fulmi, and the six segments in the dagger opened up, revealing fleshy blue coils of muscle connecting the pale blue metal of the dagger.

From the muscle fibers, lightning roared, destroying the volley.

The other volley, though –

Furio stood right in front of Vera and Emi, facing his back towards the volley and hunching his form down to protect them as much as possible with his wider frame. He concentrated mana into his body with the martial art {Guard}, turning his flesh hard like adamantite.

Stone shards shattered on his back and pattered into the dirt in front of him, blowing up tiny craters and piles of dirt.

Furio grimaced.

The shards of rock had gouged out a patchwork of bloody, raw, and circular wounds all across his back, blasting through his durable metal-weave tunic completely.

No fatal hits, though.

Furio's {Guard} was not his strong suite.

With an origin of Flow, he specialized in the movement of mana, not in condensing it into single points. His {Dash} was not great either for that reason.

A fighter with a Root or Chaos origin was far better suited for those kinds of mana forms. Root with their stabler, more concentrated mana tendencies and Chaos with its more explosive flow that could be packed into shorter lived but stronger forms.

But no use crying over the talents he was born with. One could not be perfect at everything, after all.

"Are you alright!?" said Vera. She had light-wreathed hands on Emi's unconscious figure, and from the brightness of the light, the portal to move Emi out was basically done.

Furio held down nausea as he saw Emi's legs, severed at the knee, tied down with red-stained white cloth to stem blood loss. The pool of blood beneath her was already so big, so-

He cleared his head, righting his battle will. "Take Emi out."

Vera nodded, and with a final burst of light shining from her hands that enveloped Emi, sent her away. Little particles of shining rainbow floated all around the air.

Furio turned around, facing the direction of the projectiles, for by now, judging from the flow of the spin infused in them, he had gained a sense of their origin. "And you go too. I'll meet you at the safe zone."

Vera looked at Furio's bleeding back. "No, Furio, listen to me. If I portal you out to the safe zone, I can portal myself out without any channeling. That way, all three of us can survive."

"You think I'm going to lose?" Furio gripped his wrench tight. He tapped the wrench with one finger, willing Fulmi to magnetically latch back onto the wrench head.

So far, there were no additional projectiles.

Some breathing room. "No, Vera. You have portal yourself out. Fully, and to the safe zone.

If you channel me out but leave yourself with just a short-range portal, you'll be stranded just a few minutes from here, if even that.

Whatever this monster is, it's easily reaching a C-rank threat level, and we still have no idea what more it's capable of.

If it's sensitive to portal movement, it could track you, kill you before you could even do anything.

I have to be the last one here."

Furio's eyes gleamed alight with mana and fury as he pinpointed the thicket of trees and undergrowth where the rocks came from. "And I'm going to fight. I'm going to make this monster suffer."

"Furio, listen-," began Vera. She sighed, knowing that when Furio let his emotions flare up and set his mind on something, there was no changing his mind. "You…you're going to fight, no matter what. Then the least I can do is stop holding you back."

Vera knelt to the ground, hugging her arms around herself. The rainbow circuits running up her arms shone bright, enveloping her in an iridescent haze before it faded, and with it, her physical form.

A short range portal.

Probably, Vera would manually run back out of this forest. The remote Sundan village where the safe zone lay had no Outpost, no professional healers, but hopefully the village healer would treat Emi well enough to let her survive until adventuring reinforcements came.

"Thanks for understanding, Vera," said Furio as he took in a breath, readying himself to fight. At the end of the day, Vera and Emi both held him back. That was the simple truth of it.

Though they could offer him some utility and support, Furio was leagues beyond them in power, and he essentially just carried them with him because of his bond for them.

Even then, he sensed that it might not be enough here. Against this monster. "If I don't make it back, I hope you end up with someone better for you."

With that, Furio roared into the air, loosing out all the emotions he had pent up, the rage, the desire to hurt back what had hurt what was closest to him, and sprinted forwards.

Without having to pace himself to make sure he did not leave behind Vera and Emi, he was more than twice as fast as he was before.

He used flow {Accel} to boost his stats evenly, wrapping himself in a tight, full-body aura of green.

He whirled the wrench like a spinning blade in front of him, activating Fulmi at low charge to wreath the weapon in arcs of damaging electricity as he mowed his way through the insects.

Blue flashes of lightning decorated with flying insect legs, charred guts, broken carapace, and heads flew in the air behind him as he pressed forwards, always forwards, drenched completely in white and green blood and guts, only his bright, green-tinged eyes visible in the dark.

==

The Collector clicked its mandibles, gooey green juices dripping from its maw. It had prepared a pile of insectoid corpses beside it before unleashing its volleys for this throwing maneuver was extremely costly in terms of mana consumption.

The last twin volley had cost almost twice the amount of mana as a normal throw, leaving the Collector significantly below half its mana reserves. But devouring these corpses would recharge its mana reserves, theoretically allowing for an infinite ranged bombardment.

Yet, in the time the Collector took to regain its mana, one of the female specimen had managed to create a smaller, localized warp to move the other, crippled female specimen from the battlefield.

Then, she had removed herself in short order.

"Do most humanoids within the ranks of this organization known as the 'Adventurer's League' possess warp capabilities?" asked the Collector.

The female specimen behind it could not see as far as the Collector and had been busy so far gathering insect corpses for it to consume, but she picked up on its intent and answered. 'No. Hmm…portals are the domain of Niva, goddess of paths, and those connected to her.

The priestesses of the paths. They, ah, they wear veils and have rainbow colored circuits to symbolize the rainbow root that Niva waters and tends to.'

The Collector clicked its mandibles, understanding that one of the female specimens fit under this category.

However, with her gone, this male specimen was now left stranded.

Certainly, he was the most physically and magically adept among them, surging with such energy that the Collector's desire to feast upon his flesh and core only grew with every passing moment.

Yet, what would this specimen do? Would it now flee?

With its current physical and magical capabilities and the distance between himself and the Collector, it certainly could.

Such a choice would be prudent. Logical.

And if he did so, the Collector would simply move on to its initial goal of the dungeon.

But no, the male specimen charged forwards, loosing a battle cry that roused the Collector's desire to an even greater height.

The Collector clicked its mandibles, a red aura beginning to grow from around its white-plated body.

The female daemon sensed this burst of chaotic, powerful energy and shrank back instinctively, knowing a fight was to come.

"Excellent," remarked the Collector to itself. "You will provide me with an adequate final feast."

It unsheathed its claws and started to flow mana around itself in preparation for battle. But it did not meet the male specimen's charge.

"Yet, you must overcome one more hurdle to prove worthy of my time."